Obama 2nd term: Echoes of Bush

As Barack Obama heads into his sixth year in the White House, his aides says they are all too familiar with the notion that his predicament looks similar to George W. Bush’s eight years ago. They’re two presidents dogged by crises largely of their own making, whose welcome with Americans has worn thin after two marathon elections.

One president was taking potshots from his own party over his handling of two wars and a natural disaster; the other for the botched roll-out of his signature policy achievement. One had a lackluster 43 percent approval rating, the other 41 percent. One commander-in-chief watched his party’s humiliation in the midterm election after his reelection. The other is hoping to avoid the same fate next November.

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To veterans of the Bush White House, what Obama is going through is all too predictable.

“If you look at second term presidents after they’re reelected, it’s hard for them to get off on the right foot politically,” said Matt Schlapp, the White House political director during Bush’s first term. “There’s a certain amount of fatigue that sets in – psychologically, physically, emotionally.’’

But Obama advisers, who lived and breathed Bush’s second term as Obama ran for president, insist that there are important differences that make the current White House prospects less dire. One senior White House aide said that, yes, neither Obama nor Bush succeeded in winning approval of the first domestic priority they pursued after their reelection. Still, the aide said, Obama made greater strides with immigration in Congress than Bush did on his plan to restructure Social Security.

The Obama aide also argued that while both presidents contended with unrelenting opposition to their policy priorities, support for Bush on the Iraq War plummeted in 2005 while the polling on the Affordable Care Act has been dismal and divided — but relatively steady.

No one disputes that Bush and Obama are very different presidents confronted by very different circumstances. For Bush, the problems in his second term resulted from a plethora of issues, including his handling of the wars abroad, his controversial plan to privatize Social Security, and his disastrous nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. For the current president, the problems are resulting almost exclusively from the bungled introduction of Obamacare.

But no matter Obama’s second term fate, his plight is already a familiar one for presidents at this point: the high of reelection and promise of lofty second-term policy achievements quickly give way to depleted staffs, an uncooperative Congress and missteps by the chief executive himself. Collateral damage in the next congressional election is practically assured, history shows; it’s just a matter of how bad it will be.

Since 1918, when Woodrow Wilson was commander in chief, the party occupying the White House during a president’s sixth year in office has lost House seats in every midterm election but one. That was 1998, when voters – fed up with congressional investigations into Bill Clinton’s personal life – stuck it to Republicans.

“The high point of a second term reelection fades quickly. The honeymoon is over,” said former Connecticut Rep. Rob Simmons, a Republican who in 2006 lost the seat he had held for six years after Democrats labeled him Bush’s “No. 1 supporter in Connecticut.”

In the Dec. 8, 2005 Gallup poll, three months after Hurricane Katrina, Bush registered a 43 percent approval rating, with 52 percent saying they disapproved of his performance. Almost exactly eight years later to the day, Obama’s approval in a Dec. 1 Gallup poll declined to 41 percent, with 52 percent disapproving.

Each was contending with an electorate that was unhappy both with Congress and how he was handling his defining initiative. In the Dec. 2005 Gallup survey, congressional job approval stood at just 29 percent; In a Gallup poll last month, the congressional figure was a record-low 9 percent. In December 2005, a CBS News/New York Times survey showed Bush’s approval on Iraq at just 36 percent; a Washington Post poll last month showed Obama’s approval on the health care implementation at 33 percent.

“There are similarities in terms of the challenges for Obama,” said former New York Rep. Tom Reynolds, who served as National Republican Congressional Committee chairman eight years ago. “There are similar concerns for Democratic incumbents [now] as there were for Republican incumbents in 2006.”